WE would have had a blast in West Texas even if we had never gotten around to visiting Big Bend National Park. The park was the point of the trip, but my husband, Harvey, and I quickly realized that the region had a lot more going for it. Within...

THERE is perhaps no place in the continental United States where one can feel quite as blissfully small as one does in Big Bend National Park in West Texas. It is a vast region of lonely desert and stark mountains that Spanish explorers called ''El...

STATE ROUTE 118 in West Texas isn't so much a road as it is a portal to another dimension. One of several two-lane highways branching off Interstate 10 into the cavernous heart of Big Bend Country, an area larger than Massachusetts, Connecticut and...